> Please do not spread potentially dangerous health misinformation and false hopes, even in good faith. If there was such a protocol that worked, the world would know.
Just because you have convinced yourself that legitimate treatments for Covid could never possibly be suppressed because they are not profitable, does not mean that is actually the case. Your attempts at ideological discipline disguised as "just trying to keep the forum free of dangerous misinformation" are not going to work with me.
The pattern of "HCQ didn't work, therefore Covid is untreatable and any other suggested therapies are quackery" has certainly gotten a lot of mileage since HCQ flamed out as a standalone treatment, but it is baldly anti-scientific thinking. Some other good signs of motivated, un-scientific reasoning are peppered throughout the blog post you linked (which by the way was written long before the release of numerous RCTs demonstrating ivermectin's effectiveness), such as frequent use of the term "Covidiots" or using the Surgisphere researchers (who as far as I can tell were grifters paid to discredit HCQ) to tar ivermectin because they mentioned it once.
The NIH finally had to withdraw its recommendation against ivermectin in mid-January. Of course they're still maintaining the line of "there's insufficient studies to recommend its use and we're certainly not going to fund any!" but the trend is continuing in this direction and RCTs are continuing to pile up showing its effectiveness in fending off severe cases when taken early.
Also, good news! HCQ has actually been shown to be effective in combination with other drugs like bromhexine which block the virus entry pathways that HCQ misses. Perhaps not as significant now that far better treatments like fluvoxamine and ivermectin are out there, but it still show that HCQ is a far cry from "snake oil." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7175911/
> Between one in six and one in three people, to be precise. A "little bit more" indeed.
Is it your serious contention that up to one in three people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop long haul symptoms?
> 76% of hospitalised patients still have symptoms after 6 months.
Yes, and in how many of those cases are those symptoms debilitating? What percentage of people infected are even hospitalized in the first place?
> Yes, and in how many of those cases are those symptoms debilitating? What percentage of
> people infected are even hospitalized in the first place?
Yes, how many? Shouldn't you know it if you are advocating (or at least considering) just catching the virus instead of getting vaccinated? Esp. since we do know the risks of the latter with a pretty high confidence and the scientific consensus is that you should definitely choose the vaccine and not get infected.
But to give you a number I heard: here in Hungary 3% were hospitalized for the "base" variant. Now we have the UK variant and it seems to present a higher hospitalization rate. According to a UK study it has a 55% higher fatality rate too. So with 3% you get 2.28% chance of having symptoms after 6 months (or dying). Doesn't sound good at all. That's 1 in 40 people. More than a million times the risk of getting a blood clot from e.g. AstraZeneca if it is real (and if they've discovered all the cases, of course).
I'm pretty sure it doesn't apply to the HN crowd, but on a side note, I found it quite interesting how people consistently get probabilities wrong. They may be afraid of something happening with say 1:100 000 chance (severe vaccination side effect) and saying that something else, with more severe consequences shouldn't be afraid of, because it happens pretty infrequently (dying of covid infection which we don't know exactly but is somewhere between 2:100 - 1:1000). Usually, of course, people say these in different conversations, or at least in separate comments (if online) but they'll have a hard time reconcile these even if you point out that these are numbers that they can actually compare. (Of course, I get it's the cognitive dissonance and their irrational fear of vaccines, or maybe the loss of control, still it's fascinating.)
Like many of us here, you clearly seem to be a smart person, with expertise in one or several technical fields, and confidence in your ability to learn a new one and apply your existing knowledge and mental models to it. You've probably done this many times before.
Please accept that this does not make you immune to the good old "Mt Stupid" phase of the Dunning-Krüger curve. In fact, "smart hackers" like us are really prime examples of people who might fall for it. I contend that you are currently stuck there on Covid, and together with other smart people you're finding yourself inadvertently aligned with very dumb run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorists that you would normally want nothing to do with. Please don't take that as an insult and bear with me for a moment :
Without even getting into a debate about Ivermectin, have you considered what else should be true in order for your current take on Covid severity and treatments to be correct ?
It would take a majority of people around the world who have dedicated their lives to this topic to be wrong, or careless, dumb or plain evil. Many of them are doctors and researchers who are not only acting in good faith and genuinely want nothing more than to help their patients or advance science, but perhaps more convincingly, also have personal, visceral, "can't lie about it" interests at stake, like desperately wanting to save a colleague, dear friend, or their own dad or spouse.
Please do not insult them (and delude yourself) by automatically assuming that you know better than them, that they failed to save their mom, dad or friend because they didn't want it enough.
If you believe that the powers that be (institutional research / politicians / regulators / big pharma / whatever) are broken / dysfunctional / stupid and prevent the truth from surfacing, and that people like yourself are gonna disrupt the shit out of the system, stop it now. This is the definition of arrogance, and you're deluding yourself.
I could stop here really.
But let me just answer a few of the points you raised (and then I'll consider my efforts at convincing a stranger done : do whatever you like with it) :
> Just because you have convinced yourself that legitimate treatments for Covid could never possibly be suppressed because they are not profitable,
This is a strawman argument, I do not think that. But I do use Occam's razor, and there is a much simpler explanation to the current absence of early stage treatments than a "suppression" conspiracy theory : that we really did try but simply have not found one that works yet.
This suppression theory was already untenable for the reasons most conspiracy theories are, but it should have been killed for good when 3 things happened :
1. A cheap generic drug, dexamethasone, is found to be our only effective treatment (albeit late stage only) with a 30% fatality reduction.
2. Remdesivir, the "big pharma contender" in an imaginary battle against HCQ that some insisted was happening, is found to be ineffective and is dropped without discussion.
3. In the same trials, HCQ is not outright dismissed just because it originated from quack doctors circles, but given the same fair chance as others.
> The pattern of "HCQ didn't work, therefore Covid is untreatable and any other suggested therapies are quackery
This is again a strawman argument. Covid may be treatable.
When it comes to prioritizing research, it is unlikely that a treatment touted by the same circles that touted HCQ, using the same flawed reasoning (something that does work in vitro should work in vivo) is going to be THE miracle cure. But it should still be allocated some resources to verify that. It has been, and the results are unsurprisingly, nothing to write home about.
> Is it your serious contention that up to one in three people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop long haul symptoms?
"According to a recent survey done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 35% of nonhospitalized patients who had mild COVID-19 cases did not return to baseline health 14 to 21 days after their symptoms started. And this wasn’t just in older people or people with underlying health conditions. Twenty percent of previously healthy 18-to-34-year-olds had ongoing symptoms. Overall, research shows as many as one-third of individuals who had COVID-19 and weren’t hospitalized will still be experiencing symptoms up to three months later."
> Yes, and in how many of those cases are those symptoms debilitating? What percentage of people infected are even hospitalized in the first place?
I will let you look this up, and immediately after ask yourself whether it would make more sense to reason in absolute numbers to better visualize the burden it will cause on society (hint : it would)
We're talking about letting ICUs run at full capacity for months, causing widespread grief in families, unbearable pressure on doctors/nurses, and consequences for every age group (including the 20 year olds involved in a car accident and not getting the care they could have). Not to mention that every new case is a ticket in the evolution lottery for variants.
So yeah, you probably shouldn't be second-guessing the benefits/risk profile of vaccines for people your age, and in any case please stop with the "99.x% survive this thing"/"as a healthy 30-something I shouldn't be forced to ..." narrative. It doesn't make you look good and more importantly, it definitely hurts society and it could very well hurt you or someone you love directly.
> If you believe that the powers that be (institutional research / politicians / regulators / big pharma / whatever) are broken / dysfunctional / stupid and prevent the truth from surfacing
I don't believe it, I know it, because I read the news and don't shy away from its implications. Millions of lives were destroyed by the opioid epidemic, a crime which required the complicity and silence of almost all the institutions you cite. None of them have suffered any real consequences whatsoever. But hey, that's all in the past, I'm sure it's just crazy talk to think those same institutional imperatives could be creating any problems now.
> Twenty percent of previously healthy 18-to-34-year-olds had ongoing symptoms. Overall, research shows as many as one-third of individuals who had COVID-19 and weren’t hospitalized will still be experiencing symptoms up to three months later."
There's a million variables at play here, is it a random twenty percent? My guess would be that at least in the US 20~40% all age groups are seriously unhealthy to begin with.
> Please do not spread potentially dangerous health misinformation and false hopes, even in good faith. If there was such a protocol that worked, the world would know.
Just because you have convinced yourself that legitimate treatments for Covid could never possibly be suppressed because they are not profitable, does not mean that is actually the case. Your attempts at ideological discipline disguised as "just trying to keep the forum free of dangerous misinformation" are not going to work with me.
The pattern of "HCQ didn't work, therefore Covid is untreatable and any other suggested therapies are quackery" has certainly gotten a lot of mileage since HCQ flamed out as a standalone treatment, but it is baldly anti-scientific thinking. Some other good signs of motivated, un-scientific reasoning are peppered throughout the blog post you linked (which by the way was written long before the release of numerous RCTs demonstrating ivermectin's effectiveness), such as frequent use of the term "Covidiots" or using the Surgisphere researchers (who as far as I can tell were grifters paid to discredit HCQ) to tar ivermectin because they mentioned it once.
The NIH finally had to withdraw its recommendation against ivermectin in mid-January. Of course they're still maintaining the line of "there's insufficient studies to recommend its use and we're certainly not going to fund any!" but the trend is continuing in this direction and RCTs are continuing to pile up showing its effectiveness in fending off severe cases when taken early.
Also, good news! HCQ has actually been shown to be effective in combination with other drugs like bromhexine which block the virus entry pathways that HCQ misses. Perhaps not as significant now that far better treatments like fluvoxamine and ivermectin are out there, but it still show that HCQ is a far cry from "snake oil." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7175911/
> Between one in six and one in three people, to be precise. A "little bit more" indeed.
Is it your serious contention that up to one in three people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop long haul symptoms?
> 76% of hospitalised patients still have symptoms after 6 months.
Yes, and in how many of those cases are those symptoms debilitating? What percentage of people infected are even hospitalized in the first place?